Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Chapter 2, Understanding the Curriculum in Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (2005, Barnett and Coate) is a useful starting point for considering curriculum design in HE.

This is complex area, and the slide below summarises seven notions of what might influence the development of curricula. Arguably an eigth dimension could now be added in the light of the Leitch Review (2006) and Foundation Degrees, namely that of ‘Employer Defined Curriculum’ whereby the government seeks to coerce employers into funding HE with the inducement of having a large say in the design of programmes.

Running through these notions Barnett & Coate identify three ideas that are essential in trying to understand contemporary curricula:
- the influence of the social context in the shaping of curricula
- hidden curricula processes
- the power of knowledge fields/discipline groups

A bit of a déjà vu feeling with this one. It is a racing certainty that institutions like mine will have to increasingly meet the needs of students who are not the ‘traditional’ 18 year undergraduate. They will want to study increasing amounts of CPD (short courses), will study entirely online and won’t wish to come to the institution at all, and will want to student when they need to or find the opportunity to do so – this may mean deciding they want to enrol one week and starting the next.

Institutional systems and practices cannot adequately cope with these demands (despite the good will of those trying to deliver) and will have to change. The experience of the new Masters course will inform the identification of what needs to change, but making those changes will require a systemic intervention – far more difficult to achieve.

I started this Pattern Language project last February with Ian Tindal and Richard Millwood and have been making intermittent progress since then. It is based upon the Ultraversity project and aims to capture the key elements of the approach developed for a degree programme based on action research methodology supported entirely through online communities of inquiry.

An enthusiast when I started, I am now more circumspect about the approach has anything fundamental to offer other than as a presentation framework.

I am playing around with dipity recommended by Sam as part of a data collection exercise for Bolton’s Co-educate initiative a project that I am managing, one of 12 Jisc funded Curriculum Design Projects.

One of the things we want to do is to run a series of focus groups both face-to-face and online to collect the history of the University of Bolton set in a context of UK HE policy, politics and technology. We believe that this is an important step in trying to understand the curriculum design process from inception through to delivery. If we want to find an agile and responsive way of doing this we first need to understand the complexity of impacting forces on this process.

On completion we may well produce a ‘posher’ timeline using the MIT Timeline Project software, but this looks like a good starting point as it will allow is to collaboratively ‘remember’ this history.

The London Pedagogy Planner is intended as “a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs.” – arguably an area that requires some serious attention. However, as it stands I would be surprised if any teachers actually use it. On downloading and unzipping the compressed file users are then have to open the ReadMe.text to discover that the planner is launched by opening lpp.jar A bit of thought about making this a foolproof process would have been effort well spent.

Pressing on, I am faced with a set of fields to fill in (a bit like a spreadsheet) that use typical HE descriptions of modules (“Properties”). For some reason, I couldn’t fill in “start date, number of staff, duration”.

Next I used the planning grid to allocate time against different teaching methods which then generates suggested breakdown of ‘learning experience’ – personally I think that learning activities would be a better label – who can tell what the experience will be?

Lastly I tried the “Allocate” tab where it appears that learning outcomes are mapped against topics, but none of the fields were available for me to edit, not sure why.

Beyond the problematic interface and unfriendly installation process and remembering it is a prototype there are several keyissues:

- can subject teachers be persuaded that the learning and teaching approaches are relevant enough to their discipline to warrant the considerable effort required to use the tool;
- the field labels and descriptors don’t adequately reflect the range of learning and teaching practice. For example, in work-based learning (the field I work in) I would say that inquiry is a “teaching method” not a “learning experience”. Also, what about ‘action learning sets’ or “Patchwork Text” for collaborative learning and formative assessment? The list is endless, and creative teachers will be constantly adding to it…;
- arguably, in trying to ‘atomise’ the description of learning and teaching (precise allocation of effort against topics, outcomes, teaching methods, learner experience) in support of a particular interpretation of “Learning Design”, in any practical or usable sense, all meaning is lost.

I just downloaded “Google Gears, an open source browser extension that adds offline functionality directly to the browser.” Ate the initial synchronisation which takes a few seconds if you have a lot of docs, the offline use of Google Docs is exactly the same as online, with the exception that data is stored locally and updated the next time you log into Google Docs. Working well for me at the moment but I wonder how it will deal with versioning between documents with multiple owners making offline changes and then syncing.

How much longer will we need separate word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation applications on our computers rather than use the functionality offered by browser extensions?

Dr David Hodge, President of Miami University, Ohio: Audio visual, full paper.

This practitioner conference brought to life the full breadth and diversity of the inquiry-based ‘movement’. From problem based learning in a medical context through to action research in the workplace there was an invigorating feeling of university staff striving to make learning more relevant for their students and of students responding to the challenge of complexity and uncertainty, but with the reward of authentic learning that these approaches tend to bring.

David’s keynote was a highlight for me as a compelling vision and strategy of how a learning experience for students can be transformed at an institutional level. Informed by Kegan’s personal development theory (1994) – a sequential process through which individuals can move over time from the first to the fifth order of consciousness over their lifetime, and the the ‘liberal arts’ tradition from US undergraduate education that encourages us to focus not simply on the subject but the broader development of the individual’s intellectual skills: criticality; ethical judgement; civic responsibility; collaborative problem solvng, etc.

“Student as Scholar Model represents the far end of the educational spectrum, specifically progressing from an instructional paradigm that emphasizes telling students what they need to know, to a learning paradigm that emphasizes inquiry in shaping how students learn what they need to know within the traditional academic context, and culminating in a discovery paradigm that encourages students to seek and discover new knowledge, emphasizing inquiry with no boundaries.”

David’s rigid application of Kegan’s theory overlaying a four year undergraduate experience from age 18 to 22 made me feel uncomfortable, coming as I do from a belief that individuals develop at different rates not necessarily correlating to their age. However, the BIG idea that learners can be “authorities and creators of knowledge” is something I believe to be true as demonstrated by the action research undertaken by undergraduate student researchers on the Ultraversity project.

The newly validated Masters in Learning with Technology at University of Bolton, Institute for Educational Cybernetics – recognised globally through its long-running Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS) are recruiting for new students (researchers).

When I lead the Ultraversity project at Anglia Ruskin University and in particular the development of the highly successful BA, Learning, Technology and Research, it was always our intention to validate a Masters level programme using the same approaches (work-focussed learning, online community, action-inquiry, patchwork-text assessment, etc.). However, politics got in the way of that particular development so it is with great satisfaction that this is now achieved as a part of the idibl framework.

Researchers will join the IEC community of 20 plus technologists, programmers and pedagogy specialists. It is this in-depth experience and community that students will be joining to help them through their studies.

This may be the course for you if:
* you want to design your own Masters
* you need to combine study with work
* you value learning with experts
* you prefer assessment by portfolio

The course is designed for students who are working full-time and want to study using an inquiry-based approach. This programme can complete in 15 months.

This works by researchers identifying opportunities or issues in the workplace and constructing inquiries around them, that require the taking of an action to improve the situation.

This course is delivered and supported entirely online and will suit people working in schools, colleges, FE, HE, as well as companies, charities, etc. where the role of the researcher is to develop the use of learning technologies in their organisation.

Anyone interested in studying with the IEC can email me at s.j.powell@bolton.ac.uk or stephenp.powell@gmail.com

This the idibl-framework-academic-proposal-revised.doc behind programmes using the IDIBL framework.

In Salzburg for a couple of very enjoyable days. Of particular interest me was the discussion around the presentation by Sebastien Fielder and Terje Väljataga in their paper “Competence advancement supported by social media”.

Two aspects in particular:

1. The discussion around the meaning of the word competence – always a thorny one as it carries so much baggage and means quite different things for different people, cultures and contexts. As pointed out by Sebastien and Väljataga’s paper:

“In general what used to be emphasized was the role of well trained, standardized, and largely
automated procedural skills and of factual knowledge for successful problem solving and coping.”

however a contemporary explanation might be…

“A competent actor is thus understood as an individual who has acquired factual knowledge and a set of procedural skills in a certain area, but in addition also holds orientations, values and attitudes for coping with open-ended and complex problem situations”

2. The discussion around the terms ‘self-organised vs self-directed learning’. This has puzzled me for a while and two explanations seem plausible to me. The first is that self-directed is a subset of self-organised. The second, explained by Sebastien, is that self-directed is most usefully applied to formal learning where there is pre-determined end point whereas self-organised is best used in non-formal contexts.

Below: self-organised eating for eight month old Lily :^)

Widening participation in HE is likely to continue to be a priority for many years to come. Likewise the desire by government for employers to pay a larger share of the costs of his seems here to stay.

Approach 1
In the North West of England, the Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance is aiming to address this issue through a scheme called ModCAT that “supports institutions in their attempts to provide employer-led, flexible, work-related higher education.”

The logic runs a bit like this… If an online catalogue of modules rich in subject and discipline content can be established across HE providers, then individuals and businesses will be able to ‘pick and mix’ those that best suit their needs regardless of the institution offering them. Theoretically, this should allow individuals to create programme of study by collecting modules together that build towards an award.

Approach 2
By contrast, the IDIBL Framework at the University of Bolton (the project I work on) has created a handful of modules that instead specify the processes of action inquiry for learning where students identify their own subject and discipline content informed by their practice.

Both would claim to be attempts to personalise the learner experience and one way of explaining the difference is that of the concept of Variety which is an important aspect of the Cybernetic Viable System Model. Variety is explained by Ross Ashby (1964) as “Only variety can absorb variety”.

Both approaches are attempting to match the variety of hundreds of thousands of learners with their own particular work-informed needs with modules and programmes of study offered by universities.

The first approach does this by offering thousands of different modules at different locations, from different institutions with differing subject content attenuating (reducing/filtering) this potentially overwhelming choice through the use of technology so that there is a balance.

Approach 2 matches the variety by trusting the learner to identify what it is they need to learn, based on real issues and opportunities encountered in the work-place. From this starting point they are supported in the development of an inquiry plan and learning contract that will enable them to meet the module requirements and their identified learning needs.

In this second case, it is the student who contributes significantly to the attenuation of the complexity of their work-led learning needs with the modules on offer. On their own this would be a tall order, so an online community of inquiry with fellow learners and course tutors helps with this process.

Arguably, approach 1 (ModCAT) is really about offering choice, whilst approach 2 (IDIBL Framework) has the real potential to offer a truly personalised experience.